EDITORIAL: With move to Circle, IBJ recommits to boldly cover city’s challenges

As postal carriers delivered this week’s edition of IBJ to homes and offices across central Indiana, movers were hefting boxes of notebooks and newspapers into IBJ Media’s new headquarters on the third floor of the Indianapolis Power & Light building on Monument Circle.

IBJ is moving less than two blocks, from the southwest corner of Pennsylvania and Washington streets to One Monument Circle.

But the new location feels like a new beginning—and not just because the new furniture is shiny and the technology more modern. Instead, moving to the Circle—the symbolic center of Indianapolis—reflects IBJ’s commitment to be an even more valuable resource for business news and information, and for coverage of the most critical issues facing our city, in the decades to come.

You can see that emphasis in “One City, Worlds Apart,” our ongoing series by reporter Hayleigh Colombo that examines the growing gap between the affluent and poor in Indianapolis, a chasm that threatens to limit the region’s growth.

You can read it in our new Impact Indiana section, which launches in this issue and explores the intersection of business and community. This week, reporter Lindsey Erdody examines why the city’s leading companies are increasingly lobbying lawmakers on social and community issues, such as gay rights, health care and education.

And you can hear it in the IBJ Podcast, which launched last year and dives deeper into the community’s most compelling questions about development, technology, transportation, politics and education. (We have lighter episodes, too, including interviews with restaurateurs, authors and the stars of HGTV’s “Good Bones.”)

In all these ways and more—thanks in large part to local owners, Mickey Maurer, Robert Schloss and Nate Feltman—IBJ is focused on covering the news that matters most to Indy's business and not-for-profit communities.

In the past year, we have retooled our beats to put more emphasis on covering government and elected officials—the people making key decisions every day about business regulation, taxes and spending. Sign up now for The Rundown, which brings political news to your inbox every Friday.

We doubled our investment in Forefront, now a twice-a-month publication dedicated to commentary about the most important public-policy issues locally and nationally. And we are adding features, including the personal finance column Pete the Planner, which debuts in this issue.

We are excited to now be doing that work with the Soldiers and Sailors Monument right outside our window—the view a constant reminder of our obligation to aggressively and accurately cover our community and hold elected officials and business leaders accountable.

To that end, expect IBJ to continue to call on Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration to address the problems at Circle Centre mall and with panhandling and homelessness that threaten the health of downtown. Watch for more editorials pushing lawmakers to pass an effective hate crimes bill, increase the cigarette tax, and create a redistricting commission to take the politics out of drawing legislative maps.

And we’re not giving up on the idea that Indianapolis and surrounding counties should take a big-picture view of the region and create a revenue-sharing model that helps all of central Indiana thrive.

IBJ’s move to the Circle is inspiring us to be better and bolder—and we expect our readers to hold us to fulfilling that goal.•

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To comment on this editorial, write to ibjedit@ibj.com.